AuthorTopic: Fear Management (Read 17321 times)

This doesn't touch on the FEAR aspect as much as the H2H under-trained police officer aspect. On a local radio talk show discussing some taser deaths, a caller stated quite confidently that "since all police officers are trained in the martial arts, they are quite capable of defending themselves without a weapon." The talk show host agreed. That is far from the truth, of course. I think with tasers they now have another excuse to not train. The old "I have pepper spray, a nightstick and a gun, why would I fight anyone" mentality of new officers just added tasers to the list. With names and locations left out, I know personally about a hardcore instructor that officers didn't want to train with because he was to hard on them. They probably went right back to Tae-Bo.

All-IMHO-instruction in boxing/ValeTudo is a excellent way to prepare students to face fear-starting out in these arts with a qualified instructor goes a long way for someone to face a opponent(especially in a real situation) as one learns to ovecome the natural tendency to backoff and get run over so to speak-its great to get out of harms way as quick as you can but if the situation is escalating and it will faster than you can imagine one has to be trained to act and overcome-hope that makes sense to all-along with the training in boxing/val tudo i am a firm beliefer in learning to read body and voice language skills-by listening/watching one is ahead of the game and can use fight/flight actions before attack comes. I try to read all Hocks information on the mental aspect of H2H topics as it seems to assist me in my daily work out in the street here in Kuwait-although it not as dangerous as the mean streets of Detroit/Newark/ incidents occur and one should be ready. Put boxing/Vale tudo in your game plan-stay sfe-whitewolf..

Yeah, but it doesn’t matter how much training you have; the brain still reads fear and then stimulates the adrenals, thyroid and liver with thyeoioden, adrenalin and glycogen flowing through the bloodstream in abnormal quantities. What the psychologists are seeing is how the primitive emotion of anger relates more to “fight” and the emotion of fear to “flight.” This could be the nexus of why certain people just freeze and others counter attack and escape.

Out

Joe

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"The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side"

Joe-agree on your thoughts-thats why the student has to be tested by i.e. surprise attacks-training in the dark-outside the facility-attacks by more than one person-attacks after being almost exhausted-and also responding to a attack using only one arm(the other simulating broken or unusable)-make them think outside the box thats the only way-stay safe-whitewolf

Part of managing fear, or working through it, is trying to make a distinguishment in your mind between rational fears and irrational fears. It's not that easy at times.

I have been a military flier, a police officer, and I've sparred in the sports ring. The particular flavor of fear I expereinced in each was somehow different. In flying, death can be immediate, but you kind of know what will happen in most cases: a fire will burn if this happens, the plane will spin if the wing comes off, etc. This makes it somewhat, though not always, more manageable. Getting shot at in the air is more akin to being shot at anywhere, except the sitation happens really fast and is often over before you're really aware its started. In those cases, you are usually either dead or hanging in a parachute before you have time to get really scared. One classic example: one time, flying as a crewmember on a Navy P-3B aircraft, we had the number three engine explode on final approach. Now this was not a shooting situation, but it nearly killed me and nine other people. The back end of the aircraft lit up like a red spotlight had illuminated it and the plane rolled on its side. Mind you, this was a few seconds after the tower's CGA controller had told us we were on glidslope and less than a mile from touchdown in a rather bliding snowstorm in Atsugi, Japan. The plane rolled on its side; the pilot added power on number four and effected a safe landing, rollwing wings level about three seconds before the wheels hit.

I was not scared at all during this emergency. Instead, I was curious--almost distantly recording the images and thinking, "wow, cool. Haven't seen this before." Okay, I was only 21 at the time so maybe I was just clueless. Anyway, we had to abandon that aircraft as soon as she stopped rolling, climbing down a rope in a rope in a blinding snowstorm and running away from the P-3 lest it explode (a bit of a shock since we had left 100-degree tropical weather in the Philippines only a few hours earlier). It was AFTER the thing was over, as I watched the firefighters put out the humongous wall of flame that had engulfed the whole right wing, that I got scared. It wasn't until then that I realized how close I'd come to buying it.

This fear wasn't managed, because it wasn't experienced until it was all over. I had to manage the fear later when I had to go fly again. I knew the chances of getting killed were not that great, but because I'd come so close, the first few flights were a challenge. You just sucked it up and went. And this fear was not even a fraction of the fear that WWII fliers experienced, so I make no big deal of it. It was just interesting in a way.

In Desert Shield I tried to kick off the air war before Desert Storm by directing four F-15s to shoot down an Iraqi MiG-25 that was racing toward our AWACS aircraft one night in October 1990. I felt pretty sure that the Iraqi was trying to kill the AWACS and I felt that fear, but I had enough training to manage it to the point where I was actually looking forward to killing him first. So, I directed the WD to order the F-15s to "kill" the bandit. He even questioned it, and I emphatically said "yes, kill it." So, we committed to kill with 4 F-15s while I also spent a lot of brain bytes vectoring the AWACS and the various tankers in our orbit out over the Persian Gulf. If the MiG got to us, we were pretty helpless, but I felt a certain amount of confidence in my crew and those F-15 pilots. Frankly, I was more scared that as we were racing out over the Gulf, our own Navy woudl take us for a threat and shoot us down. Needless to say, the MiG was apparently lost, for he suddenly turned around and skedaddled back into Iraq and I missed my chance at the history books by not getting to start the Gulf War that night (I was eager; the sooner we got it done, the sooner I could go home). It was hairy, but not paralyzing fear, primarily due to training and forethought (visualization?) of precisely what I'd do in that situation many times beforehand. In fact, the only scare I got was during the debrief, when my bone-headed AWACS pilot told me he didn't know if we were in the cons or not (altiutude where contrails form) and that he didn't turn off the AWACS strobes & beacon lights because to do so would have been "unsafe." Which meant that had the MiG got within 25 miles of us, he could have seen us in the dark. Yeah, we had a LONG debrief that night!

One more incident was when I was a cop. We had five bars in our town--a wet town in a dry country in north Texas. One of them was a biker bar, and one night, in an exuberant attempt to arrest a drunken biker for a PI (pulic intxication) charge, I followed him into the bar through the back door where he fled when he saw me coming. I did get scared that night. I storm into this bar and there are about a hundred bikers sitting there when I come in. I will never forget that a guy and a gal were making out on the bar when I entered. And frankly, at that point, they all looked alike: long hair, leather, colors and tattoos. And realizing my huge tactical error (alone, no backup, and in the middle of the shark school) I figured I was dead. You could have heard a pin drop when I walked in there. I was scared, but I resorted to the bluff. I figured the only way I was getting out unscathed was to look (pretend) absolutely confident as though I knew precisely what I was doing and not scared at all. I walked straight through there with as mean an expression as I could manage, like I was looking for trouble, and went right out the front door, calmly, even a bit dauntingly...but I sure didn't feel it inside. Fortunately, no one moved a muscle to stop me or anything. Sometimes bluffing does work...and believe me, I really thought about my stypid tactics after that. Going in there alone was dumb. I am sure all police officers can remember such pesonal faux pas at one time or another. You survive and you learn. The more you learn, the better you can survive.

The more you feel these kind of fears, the more you can "manage" them--defined in my words as not letting the fear rule you. Does it mean you always do the best thing? No. But it prevents you from panicking at the least and provides you some feeling of control, real or not.

Each of those were justifiable and rational fears. To not feel fear in those situations would have been stupid. Fear keeps you alive in rational fear situations.

But one of the hardest fears I ever faced was irrational. It was bungee jumping. Army parachuters will laugh, but I'd go past this bungee place in Panama City and get weak in the knees. I could fly all day with no fear, but jump out of a crane tower with only a strap attached? Paralyzing fear. It finally got to my ego that I saw teeenage girls jumping fearlessly and I was too scared to try, so I forced myself to do it. Up until the last moment I was terrified, but I was able to get leverage by realizing I'd never live with myself if I backed down. After it was over--it was actually fun once I realized the cord hadn't snapped--it was no longer fearful.

I think that is what you get from realistic scenario training. You manage fears by facing them, in controlled situations where you can. I don't recommend facing every rational fear you have--swimming with Great Whites or putting your head in a crocodile's mouth for example. Those fears are justifiable because you can die.

But irrational fears, like my bungee jumping, or my arachniphobia, those you can and should face, and head-on.

Most combat fears are somewhere in between, a mixture of both the rational and the irrational. Sparring with gloves on will certainly get you over the irrational fear of being hit. But it will not prepare you for the very rational fear of being shot or stabbed. And you certainly don't want to try to get shot at or stabbed to face that fear for real..just in training.

You have to approach fear mangement with some kind of specific intent, for both rational fears and irrational ones. The closer you can come to emulating the real situation in training, the less paralyzing fear you feel in the real event, simply because your memory banks have a reference now. But I think you need to choose the specific fear and deal with that, be it getting hit, fighting with guns, jumping from a plane or anything else. Training for one thing (getting hit with a boxing glove) doesn't train your fear for everything (getting shot at). The hit fear is irrational, but the shot fear is rational. Get specific and then find a way to experience that fear as close as you can to the real thing in your training (really face it with irrational ones, simulate it with rational ones).

I've been in law enforcement for a very long time, and I never get scared during whatever encounter I happen to be in. The fear sometimes comes afterward, but during the actual "heat of the moment", it is not there. I've been in a lot of hairy situations over the years with work on SWAT and patrol in a gang infested area, and used deadly force once when a guy tried to stab me. Even during that, there was no fear until after the fact.

I think fear is a good thing, it is what keeps us on the edge and keeps us alive. It is only when it becomes debilitating and we give into it that it has a negative affect.

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**To be a warrior is not a simple matter of wishing to be one. It is rather an endless struggle that will go on to the very last moment of our lives. Nobody is born a warrior, in exactly the same way that nobody is born an average man. We make ourselves into one or the other.** Carlos Castaneda

Joe-I read over all the posts concerning fear managment-one thing that was interesting is the statement you said concerning how you work out on the bag-you stated you dont look like a boxer=sense i do a lot of work out on the bag can you elaberate a little on the style you use so i can try-dont have to go into a lot of detail just the basics sir- I assume you are talking about striking with elbows/open palms/slaps/knees/positioning with the feet=thanks WW (ELB)